"Immediately contacting the repository owner, and asking them to remove the content themselves within a short window of time, sounds like an expeditious response to my non-lawyer ears.
Except, uh, you cut out the object of this sentence, which is the service provider, not the user.
That is, github, not the user, is supposed to be the person responding expeditiously to remove.
Contacting someone is neither "removing" nor "disabling access".
The law is simply not ambiguous here, and github trying to play this game is not likely to go well in an actual court, as much as i'd like it to be the case (i know other companies have been threatened on exactly this point before).
If the user doesn't do it themselves within that short window, then GitHub has to. Every web hosting company I've worked with in the last 10 years has forwarded DMCA notices on to customers. They only disable a server if you don't handle the removal yourself. I don't think GitHub is trying anything new here.
"If the user doesn't do it themselves within that short window, then GitHub has to."
It sounded like you were claiming otherwise, saying that asking the user is acting expeditiously "enough", and that they can then "not remove" or slow down removal.
If you aren't claiming that, then we have no argument :)
Except, uh, you cut out the object of this sentence, which is the service provider, not the user.
That is, github, not the user, is supposed to be the person responding expeditiously to remove. Contacting someone is neither "removing" nor "disabling access".
The law is simply not ambiguous here, and github trying to play this game is not likely to go well in an actual court, as much as i'd like it to be the case (i know other companies have been threatened on exactly this point before).